University of Birmingham Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights and camps Sigona, Nando DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1105995 License: None: All rights reserved Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Sigona, N 2016, 'Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights and camps', Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 263-279. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1105995 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Robin Cohen Keywords: Statelessness, Roma, Citizenship, legal status, state, Italy URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers [email protected] Page 1 of 14 Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 2 3 4 Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights and camps 5 6 Nando Sigona 7 8 9 10 11 12 Contact Details 13 NANDO SIGONA is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work and Deputy 14 Director of Forthe Institute forPeer Research into ReviewSuperdiversity at the University Only of Birmingham. ADDRESS: 15 Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 16 2TT, UK. Email: [email protected] 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 1 60 URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers [email protected] Ethnic and Racial Studies Page 2 of 14 1 2 3 Everyday statelessness in Italy: status, rights and camps 4 5 Nando Sigona 6 7 8 Abstract 9 10 This article is an invitation to reflect sociologically on statelessness, to date mostly absent from an 11 otherwise burgeoning sociological debate on citizenship, rights and legal status. Millions of stateless 12 people worldwide challenge a core tenet of state-centric teleological imagination, namely that in 13 order for the hegemonic state system to work everyone must be a citizen of a state, confirming 14 For Peer Review Only 15 instead the need for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of membership 16 attentive to the interplay of different rights regimes. 17 While the article characterizes the Roma as the undeserving stateless, so alien to the dominant 18 imagination of citizenship as to be even denied access to the procedure for status recognition, it also 19 argues that the experience of Roma families who have lived for years in Italy in absence of any 20 formal citizenship complicates Hannah Arendt’s insightful characterization of stateless people as 21 rightless. The lack of any citizenship does not make the Roma bare life , it reveals instead political 22 23 subjectivity as an embodied and emplaced process, where subjects actively negotiate individually 24 and within family their position in the world and vis-à-vis the state. 25 26 Keywords 27 28 Statelessness; Roma; citizenship; legal status; state; Italy 29 30 31 32 33 Introduction 34 With a few notable exceptions (see Redclift 2013a, 2013b), attention to how statelessness is 35 36 experienced has been only marginal in sociological debates. This paper aims to contribute to 37 addressing this gap while placing the study of statelessness and stateless persons within the domain 38 of the burgeoning sociology of rights, citizenship and belonging (Isin 2002; Morris 2002; Bloemraad 39 2006; Sommers and Roberts 2008; Isin and Neilson 2008; Menjívar 2010; Nash 2012; Barrett and 40 Sigona 2014). It is an invitation to reflect sociologically on a phenomenon that to date has received 41 little theoretical and critical scrutiny despite affecting millions of people worldwide. 42 43 This article builds on previous work concerned with the complexity of the relationship between 44 bureaucratic labelling and belonging which was carried out as part of my doctoral research and 45 inspired by Roger Zetter’s conceptualization of ‘the refugee’ as a label (Zetter 1991, 40; Zetter 2007). 46 It is divided in three sections. Firstly, I discuss why statelessness should be an area of sociological 47 inquiry, and put forward a tentative theoretical framework to pursue this proposal. Next, the legal 48 and policy framework for the recognition of the status of stateless person in Italy is introduced and 49 legal and procedural hurdles that impact on stateless Roma are highlighted. Finally, the article 50 explores two dimensions at the margins of current academic and policy conversations on 51 statelessness: the everyday relationship between statelessness and rights; and the family as a key 52 arena where the impacts of statelessness are experienced and negotiated. The discussion draws on 53 ten in-depth qualitative interviews with stateless Roma families 1 and ten interviews with lawyers, 54 practitioners and activists working with Roma people carried out as part of the Leverhulme-funded 55 56 Oxford Diasporas Programme, and also on previous ethnographic work in Roma encampments in 57 Italy which formed part of my research on the legal and bureaucratic construction of the ‘Gypsy 58 problem’ in Italy (Sigona 2009). Overall, the article argues that the investigation of the social 59 2 60 URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers [email protected] Page 3 of 14 Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 2 3 condition of statelessness reveals the contingent and shifting contours of this phenomenon, and 4 offers some insights on how the process of status recognition is experienced by stateless persons. 5 6 7 Imagining statelessness sociologically: notes for a conceptual framework 8 9 The right to nationality emerged under international law in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human 10 Rights (UDHR) developed in response to the mass population displacement and large-scale 11 denationalizations of the First and Second World Wars. But ‘statelessness is a phenomenon as old as 12 the concept of nationality’ (United Nations 1949, 4). 13 In 1954, the UN Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons was adopted, followed in 1961 by the 14 For Peer Review Only 15 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Unlike the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of 16 Refugees to which they are closely related, these conventions attracted fewer signatures and 17 ratifications. The mandate for the protection of stateless persons was given to the UNHCR but 18 remained a minor concern within the Agency for many years, with a surge of interest since the end 19 of the 2000s. 20 Statelessness may result from various circumstances, both individual and collective. Blitz (2006; see 21 Manly 2007, 2012) distinguishes between primary and secondary sources of statelessness. The 22 23 former relates to direct discrimination and includes: the denial and deprivation of citizenship, and 24 the loss of citizenship. The latter relates to the context in which national policies are designed, 25 interpreted and implemented. While many conditions give rise to the creation of statelessness, 26 including protracted refugee situations and state succession, most stateless persons today are 27 members of minority groups (UN Human Rights Council 2009). The Roma, discussed here, are a case 28 in point as they are affected both by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and by their stigmatized position 29 as a minority both there and in Italy. 30 31 A lack of international consensus over who is to be considered ‘stateless’, particularly in relation to 32 people who, unable to prove their nationality or, despite documentation, being denied access to 33 many human rights that other citizens enjoy, are de facto stateless, makes counting the world’s 34 stateless population a challenging task. As a result estimates vary considerably, ranging from 3.3 35 million to tens of million (UNHCR 2013), and often revised upward ‘as new stateless populations are 36 identified’ (Manly 2007). This difficulty exceeds the domain of empirics and methodology to 37 highlight three fundamental issues: firstly, the artificial nature of categorical distinction in law 38 between de facto and de jure stateless persons, as acknowledged in 1949 by the UN Secretary 39 General, for whom the situation of de facto and de jure stateless persons ‘in practice […] is similar’ 40 2 (UN 1949, 7). Secondly, statelessness is a condition that changes over time, ‘dynamically created 41 and recreated by sovereignties in their own interests, defining the vulnerable in ways that affirm the 42 43 invulnerable, and in the process revealing changing domestic values and changing power relations 44 across international boundaries’ (Kerber 2007); hence a global phenomenon but not a homogenous 45 one, with causes ‘that lie both outside the state and within it’ (Blitz and Lynch 2009, 94).